anything were really to be made of your moral campaign against the
English nation, it was clearly necessary that somebody, if it were only
an Englishman, should show you how to leave off professing philosophy
and begin to practise it. I have therefore sold myself into the Prussian
service, and in return for a cast-off suit of the Emperor's clothes (the
uniform of an English midshipman), a German hausfrau's recipe for poison
gas, two penny cigars, and twenty-five Iron Crosses, I have consented
to instruct you in the rudiments of international controversy. Of this
part of my task I have here little to say that is not covered by a
general adjuration to you to observe certain elementary rules. They are,
roughly speaking, as follows:--

First, stick to one excuse. Thus if a tradesman, with whom your social
relations are slight, should chance to find you toying with the coppers
in his till, you may possibly explain that you are interested in
Numismatics and are a Collector of Coins; and he may possibly believe
you. But if you tell him afterwards that you pitied him for being
overloaded with unwieldy copper discs, and were in the act of replacing
them by a silver sixpence of your own, this further explanation, so far
from increasing his confidence in your motives, will (strangely enough)
actually decrease it. And if you are so unwise as to be struck by yet
another brilliant idea, and tell him that the pennies were all bad
pennies, which you were concealing to save him from a police prosecution
for coining, the tradesman may even be so wayward as to institute a
police prosecution himself. Now this is not in any way an exaggeration
of the way in which you have knocked the bottom out of any case you may
ever conceivably have had in such matters as the sinking of the
_Lusitania_. With my own eyes I have seen the following explanations,
apparently proceeding from your pen, (i) that the ship was a troop-ship
carrying soldiers from Canada; (ii) that if it wasn't, it was a